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"\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\n\n\nI'm going home for Thanksgiving this year. By home I mean where my parents and my brother's kids are. It'll be the first time in what feels like a long, long time. They ordered barbecue for dinner; I can't wait.The past few Thanksgivings have been scattered. I've been all over\u2014in a tourist-populated New York City, along an empty beach in rural Maryland, hunkered in a cabin in West Virginia\u2014but Josh was the through line. He was my family for the last four Thanksgivings. Josh, who has recently eclipsed the others and become the Big Ex.Sometimes I'll be overcome by a flash of hormones and I'll think that life didn't exist before Dustin. He's the beginning and the end, full stop. It's totally true and yet I'm totally lying too. I think about life B.D. constantly. Four years with Josh. Two-and-a-half years with someone else before that. The bodies move out but the ghosts remain and damn, if those motherfuckers aren't some squatters. Try, try, try\u2014go ahead and try! You will never kick them out, not completely.There's the emotional reality of it, but there's also the physical to consider. The stuff, you know? So. much. stuff. Josh and I lived together, and when I moved away, which was before we broke up, I packed only what was absolutely necessary for my survival\u2014mattress, lamp, cookbooks, kitchen equipment\u2014and left the rest with him. We stayed friends after the breakup because neither of us could tolerate the thought of life without the other person. We have a lot more breathing room now than we did at first. We don't share as many links. We don't FaceTime anymore. It takes him days to like my posts. You throw up a buffer and grow a crusty shell as a way to be your own. MovinOn.org.Dustin and I were walking out of the subway station the other day when my phone rang. It was Josh. We talked about work and Thanksgiving (it's just him and his parents this year). Somehow we got around to talking about all my stuff.\"I know you said you miss your black heels, so I'm mailing them to you,\" Josh said. \"I figure you miss your other things too. Like your Domokun onesie.\"The Domokun onesie is indeed a thing. It has a hood. I used to wear it all the time.\"I'm not saying you need to come get it now or anything,\" he continued, \"but if you want it, it's here.\"I'd been wondering when Josh was going to bring it up. He's still swimming in the little life we created together. I have no idea how he does it. Hanging on the walls, which are a beautiful eggplant shade we landed on after too many heated discussions about colors, are the photo prints I framed, and the mirrors he spent hours lining up. The stone coffee table we found at a vintage store. The striped rug we raced to buy in an auction online.Who does it all belong to? Hadn't I already let it go?The truth is that I hadn't. I haven't been able to face it, any of it. Back when I shoved my mattress into the U-Haul along with the stand mixer his mom gave me and a stupid wobbly chair missing a screw, I knew I'd have to deal with the stuff at some point, but I wasn't about to do it right then.When I went back on the weekends to visit him when we were still together, I didn't have to think about what to do with my things because it was just nice to have them right where they'd always been. Josh included. Josh especially.All around the breakup, we never said anything about the mountain of shit that I have lingering in every corner. There are boxes of books in the basement storage unit, wool coats in the hall closet, a cruiser in the bike room that I couldn't remember the passcode for but that Josh could. The Domokun onesie.\n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nHe's talked about the stuff out loud now, totally gently, and I'm still not ready. If I went back and got it all, it would mean I'd extricated. It would mean that nothing was binding us together anymore. It would mean that it was really over.Turns out it's not the ghosts who won't leave. Turns out it's me who won't let them.  \"Do you miss Josh?\" Dustin asked when I got off the phone.Nod. I do.\"I understand if you want to go back to him,\" he said.I was baffled. What on earth?\"Well, if you love someone, you set them free, right?\"Dustin was talking about us (omgomgomgomgomgomg he used the L word! Not officially officially, but still! We will talk about that later!), but I felt very strongly and immediately that I did not want Dustin to mean us, not in the least, not now, not ever.\n\nBut the point was taken. If I love Josh, I should set him free. Someday soon, I'll be ready to let him go. Fingers crossed.  Read Helin's earlier \"I'm With Him\" columns here, here, and here.Photo credit: Sisi Recht"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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